Lara
by The Living Hobnail
Summary: [When Good Ghouls Go Bad This fic. Takes place before the movie starts. A long time before the movie starts. Sort of Mushy, NO blood or gore.
1. Chapter 1

When Lara first stepped from this planet, she arrived in the middle of a cold, rainy, summer night. At the time, she was seven years old. Not knowing where she would end up, for better or for worse, she stood up, and took her very first steps toward suburbia. Her steps were weak and shaky at first, but slowly became stronger the more she walked. Using trees' branches and rocks, she pulled herself through the forest, and watched as the trees became spaced farther apart, the rocks became smaller, and the rain poured more heavily on her, soaking her to the bone. Her teeth began to clatter, and her long, dark, brown almost black hair began to stick to her naked body. It was all very new, very strange. She slowly descended into a row of seemingly never-ending fields, all of them empty, except for one. She walked faster, and much quieter as she snuck closer to the herd of creatures, she was still at least twenty feet away from them when they saw her and started to bray angrily at her, their ears flattened against their heads. A few of them pawed the ground anxiously, and screamed loudly into the cold night air. Lara froze, pretending to be part of the background, knowing that if she didn't move they wouldn't see her. A large white one went up to her, and slowly extended its long head, it gave her a sniff before snorting and galloping off back towards the herd.

When she finally found a house, the sun had almost risen. Taking two steps at a time, she dashed onto the front porch. She stood there, unsure of what to do. Sitting down beside the door, she hugged her body to her, teeth chattering, a cold wind blowing her skin to the freezing point. Her eyes began to close, feeling like they weighed a ton. Her breathing became slower, more paced, and her mind began to drift away. Suddenly, the door smashed open on the other side of Lara, making her jump from her sleep. A little girl around her age leaped out with a teddy bear in her hands. Laughing and leaping, the little girl pranced down the stairs in a yellow dress, with a matching yellow bow at the end of her long braided hair. A woman with the same coloured hair chased after her, grabbing her and pretending to chew on her belly. The little girl shrieked with laughter and squirmed happily. The woman swung her around and around herself, until they fell on the soft ground, soaked and covered in mud. The little girl was still giggling uncontrollably, and the woman was smiling. The little girl stopped giggling as she saw Lara crouched beside the doorway.

"Mama, who's that?" She asked, her mother, who also stopped laughing, and looked in the same direction.

And that was how Lara found a family.

At the age of eight, she was declared mute by the very first doctor that gave her a full physical. According to Dr. Tam, she had no vocal cords, which was very, very odd and had to be the strangest case of muteness that she had ever seen. Lara was then sent to a private tutor who taught her to speak Sign Language. It took Lara about half a month of full day lessons to learn it all, but she could speak it fluently and precisely. The only ones in her family who knew what she would be saying was her 'sister', Taylor, and her parents never could get the hang of it, but they ended up learning half of what Lara had learned. Taylor was an outgoing child. She was playful, happy, and (To Lara's outmost annoyance) nosy. Whenever Lara was about doing things in the early years, Taylor would always sneak up behind her and ask the same, obnoxious question;

"What'cha doing Lara?" She'd ask, hands behind her back, her little face jammed very close to her sister's. Lara would sigh deeply and sign;

"No idea."

Taylor mellowed out when she was around the age of ten. She would no longer pester Lara, but would leave her to her own devices. In fact, she never even went into the room to see what Lara would do.

Lara got sick of her hair and cut it above her shoulders, almost to her chin, and put on the glasses her mother had nagged her to wear, as her eyesight needed improvement. Lara went to her room and sighed heavily. Her sister no longer wanted to play with her, she had no friends in the town of Pearl Mountains, and she wasn't allowed to go near the forest, HER forest.

Lara sank into a deep depression, which was another odd thing about her, because ten year old girls don't usually become depressed. At least not like that. Her parents decided to get her involved in something.

They decided to get her an instrument.

Lara gripped her mother's hand as she went through the large music store. Lara sullenly looked at all the people there. She saw strange looking people near the guitars and drum kits, young jazzy-looking folk near the Saxophones, children younger than her around the pianos and……

"What's this?" she signed quickly. Her mother gave her a quizzical look, and asked her if she meant this. Lara nodded.

"Oh… It's a violin."

Lara walked up to it, her head cocked thoughtfully. She slowly picked it up from its stand and placed it under her chin. Grabbing the nearest bow, she placed the soft part on a string. It flowed to her, it was tricky, yet so much fun! Her mother stopped talking to a man beside her and looked around at Lara. The man stopped and looked at her. A few women turned around and looked at her. The whole store became quieter and quieter. Lara quickly pulled the bow off in alarm, and looked around in embarrassment.

"We'll take it." Her mother said, quickly doling out money to the man, who seemed to be in a trance, staring open-mouthed at Lara.

Buying the Violin had brought a lot of financial stress to the family, which was already in a deep debt, and thinking of no other way for them to make ends meet, they decided to move when Lara and Taylor were twelve.


	2. Chapter 2

Lara first stepped into Walker Falls, she smelt something. She couldn't put her finger on it, but it was defiantly something she didn't want to smell again. The smell then vanished as quickly as it had come to her. Lara shut the door of the moving van behind her, and grabbing her incased violin and bow, she walked through the gateway of her new house. It was old and ancient looking, with a Victorian flair. There looked to be around two stories but there could have been more, she couldn't tell. There was a large tower looming down on her, complete with a large window. She did a double take as she saw a figure in the window, staring down at her. Looking closer, she saw that it was a boy around her age with wild black hair and pale skin. Slightly taken aback she walked towards her sister and, without taking her eyes off of the boy, she signed to her;

"Why is there a boy in our house?" Complete with a sidelong glance. Her sister grinned mischievously and pointed out that that wasn't their house, it was their neighbors'. Blushing, she gave the boy a shy wave and dashed to her house.

It was a small cottage-like house, complete with three bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, and no basement or family room. Lara sat down on the floor of her empty, dark room, and leaned her head against the wall, wishing she could stay there forever, not eat, not sleep, just play her violin. Just her and her violin. She took a deep breath, and went outside, helping her family with the boxes and bags. The boy was still watching, but it seemed to be her in particular that was being watched. She had glanced at him once more before she tried to ignore him and carry on naturally with what she was doing. He looked different. He wore black. Just black (maybe a little bit of white or grey, but mostly black). He had a tie which was covered in safety pins, gloves with no fingers, and a long black coat. It was hard for her to tell in a glance much more than that, but she guessed that his eyes were a dark brown. Her sister carried out the last box and walked beside her, grinning profusely.

"Made friends already?" She asked, laughter in her voice. Lara just raised her eyebrows and looked at her incredgously, knowing that Taylor knew very well that her hands were full so she couldn't respond.

One of the house's bonuses was that it had a large tree in its backyard. It was an old oak that must have been around one hundred years old, for its base was at least two meters wide, and it was as tall as the mansion's tower beside them. The previous occupants of the house had built a treehouse near the very top of the tree. It was old, but stable, and there was a trapdoor in it. It was fairly large (for a treehouse), probably the size of Lara's new bedroom, and had a window facing the tower's side window.

Lara lay in bed late that night, and just stared at the ceiling. At the last school she went, she was considered… strange, in a bad way. People thought it was weird how she couldn't speak, she didn't want to hunt, she wouldn't touch meat, she liked weird rock bands, she played the violin (at her age, it was considered weird), she dressed differently (Lara really didn't think that wearing different kinds of clothing should be a reason to shun someone), she loved anything to do with horror, she liked the woods more than the town, and so on. The last prank that was ever pulled at her at that school was when someone had put pink paint in her locker and put it in such a way that it came flooding down on her as soon as she opened the door. She stood there for a while, and then walked out the front door and straight home without asking for permission. Lara became anxious and got out of bed, pacing quietly up and down her room. Whenever she got like this she had this urge to run out the front door and into the forest, only the closest forest was sort of far away from her, about a mile. She brushed her teeth and hair, then put on some clothes and her glasses. Grabbing her violin, she snuck out the back door and into the backyard. She slowly climbed up the tree, letting her hands guide her, her eyes closed until she felt that she was at the top. Opening her eyes slowly, she pulled herself up and sat with her back against a wall. Lifting her violin to her chin, she played softly at first, then a little louder. She played some soothing music, then some mellow, brooding music. She played how she felt, always. She didn't like playing other people's music, unless she was feeling the same mood as it made. Lara gently placed the violin and bow in its case, and closed her eyes. She was tired, yet no sleep would come to her. She never slept much in the night. When she opened her eyes, she saw into the tower's window. She didn't feel so lonely when she saw the boy. He was fully dressed and moving rapidly around a large canvas. His brush was moving rapidly across it, probably making a whapping noise that was very, very faint to Lara's ears. She could almost hear it. If she concentrated very hard, she could make her sounds from her imagination come to life. Taylor said most people can do that, they just don't want to admit it, and then they end up blaming innocent people for crimes that they're convinced they saw or heard them do, when really it's their imagination.

The room was only half-illuminated by the moon, so Lara couldn't get a good idea of what the painting looked like, but she was sure that the boy knew she was there, and he didn't want her to look at the painting. When Lara thought about it, she suddenly felt very guilty for spying on him, and hurried down the ladder and back into the house, leaning against the closed door, still not feeling tired.

The next day, Lara set out by foot to her forest. She felt akward walking down the main street of Walkerfalls, what with a few people whispering, most staring, most making her feel uncomfortable. She stared right back at those who were staring at them, staring them right in the eye, until they looked away. She wasn't afraid of them. On her way out of town, she passed a few kids her age, two boys, and one girl. They stopped talking and nudged each other, the girl started to snicker, and the boys smirking as they looked her up and down. Lara knew immediately that they would be a constant source of grief for her. She ignored them the best she could and kept on walking until she was out of the town by some length, and she hit a dirt road. It was long, and the forest just barely stretched its tendrils far enough for her to be able to say that she was in the forest. The farther away she went from the town, the closer together the trees got, the darker the woods became. The more she felt at home. Lara veered off the road and stepped into the forest, her whole body pulling at her to go deeper and deeper, until she found herself running as fast as she could, and until it became dark as night, and she felt herself at the heart of it all. Suddenly collapsing, she landed gently on the soil, her whole spirit content, no longer wanting anything. When she opened her eyes, she saw a deer, its whole body still warm, its heart no longer beating, stare at her, their faces almost touching. Looking sadly at its corpse, she found as many sticks and logs as she could, and burned it with them, talking to the forest, asking it to please let the deer rejoin, live again as something else. The fire eventually died down, and the ashes of the deer were packed into one large mound. Lara watched as a little Robin popped its head out of the ashes, and twerped and chirped as it struggled to become free of its past body's ashes. Lara thanked the forest, and helped the little bird dig its way out, and then soar off into the sky after nodding its head to Lara. Lara walked off contentedly, as she had almost forgot what dirt smelt like.


	3. Chapter 3

When Lara got home, it was almost black outside, and the temperature had dropped significantly. Her parents rushed over to her from the kitchen table, and started hugging her. Taylor was right behind them.

"Next time you go off like that, tell us first. We thought something had-had….." Her mother said, choking back tears. Lara looked apologetically at them and hugged them back, gave them a kiss on the cheek and signed that she was going to bed. Taylor looked sullenly at her as Lara went to the bathroom and brushed her teeth. When she had changed and sat in the dark on her bed, Taylor came in and sat down beside her.

"I've heard a lot about your friend." She teased.

Lara's eyes flickered annoyance, so Taylor smiled, and lay down beside Lara.

"I'd stay away from him if I were you. He's supposed to be a nut job."

"I haven't gotten near him, and I don't even know him." Lara signed angrily.

"To some extent you know him, maybe more than you think you do, seeing as you've clicked with him. I've seen him watching you whenever you walk by, or when you play violin at night. And I've also seen you watch him. I'd seriously stay away from him, though, he does seem pretty creepy. He can only mean trouble." Taylor was grinning ear to ear with amusement as she got under her sister's skin. Lara looked at her in annoyance and rolled over, her back facing Taylor.

"Who were you with today?" Lara signed. Taylor laughed.

"A few people. They seemed nice enough, but I wasn't really interested in them."

Lara rolled around quickly and rolled her eyes in an exaggerated manner. Taylor smiled.

"OK, maybe I enjoyed the company of at least ONE of them."

"You should stay away from him, I've heard a lot of weird things about him, he seems pretty creepy." Lara signed jokingly. Taylor laughed.

"Oh, shut up." She squealed, then hit Lara with a pillow. Lara felt relieved that Taylor was so giggly. Her sister had been slightly sullen for the past few weeks at the prospect of leaving the town she had been growing up in for a town she knew nothing about.

The next day, Lara went out to the woods again, this time to the lighter part, where the energy was weaker, and the animals were more abundant. She was walking along a stream when she heard a gurgle. It was not the kind of gurgle from a stream, it was the kind of gurgle that came from a drowning animal. Lara quickened her pace towards the sound, until she found a writhing potato sack tied to the bottom of the stream. Reaching down, she pulled it out of the water, and then put it on land. She got a sharp stone and began to hack away at the rope until it was thin enough for her to pull it apart by hand. She yanked on it and hung it at a forty degree angle, so the creatures could come out without falling too quickly. Three puppies no larger than her hand came tumbling out on top of her. Only one of them was moving. The other two had their eyes wide open, and were still. Lara desperately did a CPR maneuver she had learned to use on humans, but five minutes later, they were still. Lara burned their bodies and asked for them to be taken back, and then she scooped up the other one, which was shivering and whimpering from the cold and shock. When taking a moment to look at it, Lara noticed that it was the smallest of the three, and had a longer, slinkier tail. She (As it turned out to be) was a snowy white colour, and what little hair it had was very thin. Lara smiled as she cradled it in her arms.

Lara came walking home ten minutes before dinner with a small, thin puppy in her arms, and a look of determination on her face. Marching straight to her room, she grabbed a blanket and started to dry off the squiggling white mass. Picking it up, she went to the kitchen and decided to show her find to her parents. Knowing that no way she tried to present her to them, it would all have the same response, so she walked up to her mother, who was doing the dishes, and shoved the puppy about half a foot under her nose. Her mother jumped away from it and gave Lara a dark scowl.

"Don't shove that in my face young lady. Who on earth gave it to you?"

Lara shrugged and groped around for a scrap of paper and pencil.

_I found it._ She scribbled. _It was drowning._

"Mmm. Well, we'll see what your father says to this when he gets home. No final decisions just yet."

Lara was keeping the dog if she had to hide it under her bed for a month and feed it scraps. If she was a dog, she'd prefer that to death in a stream. Lara curtly nodded her head and took one of the cabbages her mother was washing and began to scrub it off with only a hint of impatience. Lara's mother just frowned.


	4. Chapter 4

Lara lay in bed that night with the puppy draped protectively under her arm. Tonight there was no moon, and the stars were dull, and many were nonexistent in the black drape of a sky. Gritting her teeth, feeling resentment for the thin walls of the house, she listened ruefully to her parent's nighttime conversation.

"Why? Why on earth should we deny her the dog? She's proved herself responsible plenty of times!"

"Not recently she hasn't! Everyday she's running off into the woods! She won't get a drive, she won't use a bicycle, she doesn't want Taylor with her, and she walks! What if she gets lost? She can't ask people for help, or directions. If she sprains her ankle or is injured, she can't scream for help! No one can hear her scream! I don't think she's being responsible enough for a dog."

"Honey…."

"Don't 'Honey' me, Roger, I don't think she's ready!"

"She's twelve years old! When I was five I got my first pet, and I would go into the woods just like she does."

"Yeah, but she's not five!"

"I'm well aware of that! Giver her a chance! If she screws up we'll give the thing away, if not she should be able to keep it."

"If she wants companionship, she can make friends at scho-"

"What are you talking about? When in the last five years that she's been with us has she ever, even once made a friend before? She's the odd one, Janice, she's the odd one. Other parents don't like her being in the same class as their kids, teachers are slightly unnerved by her, and kids tease her! They call her a vampire and stuff, because of her skin complexion, and about how she never wants to do what other kids want to do. How she's vegan! How the hell will this place be any different from-" Her father's voice rose above whispers and was quickly shushed by her mother. Lara slapped her hands over her ears and squeezed her ears shut. She didn't want to hear this. The puppy jolted up and began to whimper, as it was not yet at the howling stage of its childhood. Lara sighed and sat up in bed. Picking the skinny runt up, she plopped it on its back and began to cradle it like a mother would a baby. Lara felt like a mother. July passed, and then August was almost over. It scared Lara slightly to think that she would be starting a new school, and the same problems would reoccur and reoccur, and the only subject she concentrate on would be Music, which was probably taught by some tempermental maniac who hated when kids actually rose up to his expectations. Lara sighed.

Taylor, on the other hand, was thrilled with the idea of going to a new school. She already made friends and knew everything about the school; its teachers, students, janitors, lockers, room numbers, etc.

Morning, afternoon, night, they were all the same thing to Lara. Each was beautiful in its own way. It was like waking up to a surprise everyday, and not being even remotely disappointed.

The night before the summer was over was the night where Lara felt the most nervous and tortured of all. She didn't want to think about it, but every time she felt herself drift off to sleep it would pop up and surprise her. She paced, she stretched, she ate a snack, but she still couldn't get it off of her mind. The puppy been given away to her uncle almost a day after she found it, causing Lara some painful and sleepless nights. To take her mind off of things, Lara put on some clothes and went to the treehouse, playing her violin. She put as much nervousness in the music as she could, and almost an hour later, Taylor stuck her head out of her window and told her to shut up, she was making her nervous about school. Lara smiled and packed up, almost smelling the anxiety in the air.


	5. Chapter 5

Lara got around four hours of sleep that night, and woke up two hours before school started. Feeling preoccupied, she almost drunk the jam instead of the Orange Juice, almost washed her mouth out with Witch Hazel instead of mouthwash, and almost packed a jar of mustard in her lunch instead of a water container.

Walking to school was unpleasant for her. She was trying to get the hang of writing down what she wanted to say instead of signing it. Taylor wasn't helping her much.

"It's too slow." Lara scribbled.

"Mmmm…..Sorry, couldn't read it, too messy. You're going to have to get better at that. People won't know what you're saying."

Lara sighed, feeling miserable already.

"I'm not going to stop signing, you know. Maybe I don't want anyone to know what I'm saying."

"Oh, yeah, like you're gonna get far doing that. You're going to screw up at school!" They rounded the corner and began to approach school. "Anyway, look at me and swear that you won't hang around that kid. Promise?"

Lara ignored her and kept on walking. "Please?"

Lara spun around and gave her a scowl. Some words don't need to be spoken.

Walking past the other kids was the hardest part. Like the previous schools, her peers became suddenly quiet whenever she would walk by, and stare at her like she had two heads. As soon as she was gone, the whispers started. Her next door neighbor was in her class, and his name was Curtis Danko. Class was hell for her. For the first portion of the day, her teachers didn't understand why she was writing things down and became aggressive with her. One took away her notepad before she could explain, and then asked her all the questions from the lesson. Lara just sat and stared at him until he started yelling and she was kicked out of class. After a while, Lara became fed up waiting for him to come out to yell at her for being mute, so she walked down the hall and began to explore the school. The halls were deserted, and the classrooms were full, so she grabbed her homework and knapsack and decided to explore outside of the school, and before she knew it, she was walking home. When she was almost off of school property, she thought she heard the insane barking of a dog, but turned around to see her teacher sticking his head out of the window and yelling at her, with most of the kids behind him watching her, giggling viciously. Lara cocked her head to the side for a moment and then turned her back on them all.

Lara came home twenty minutes before the end of the school day feeling frustrated and annoyed. As soon as she stepped through the front door, she heard her mother talking calmly on the phone, using the voice she used whenever she too, was aggravated. Lara walked right past her and into her room, where she gently closed the door and lay down on her bed, staring at the ceiling. Lara smiled bitterly at the idea that she would ever make friends anywhere. Everywhere she went she was treated with extreme caution, like she was a bomb ready to explode at any moment. Well, after they learned she was mute, or 'disabled' as all the adults referred to her as. The kids called her retarded. Even though she couldn't talk, she was still fully functional in every other part of her body, including her mind. She supposedly was very intelligent, with an IQ over 130, but Lara doubted it very much, as she got poor results from schoolwork tests and projects and assignments, but she supposed that was because she never tried to do well.

Twenty minutes later, her mother knocked on the door, and let herself in.

"The teachers are pretty upset with you." She announced to Lara. Lara kept on staring at the ceiling, her face neutral. "They say they sent you to the hall, and the next thing they knew, you were outside with your knapsack and walking down the street. They also say you were being disrespectful to them by not answering their questions, and didn't say a word to them all day, even when they said they greeted you with a friendly tone of voice and manner."

"How am I supposed to talk to them if I've got no vocal chords, they don't know a word in my language, and they take away my notepad and don't give it back?" Leta signed violently.

"Um…" Lara's mother's lips twitched upwards as she was trying to swallow her smile, "I told them about you being mute when they were done rant-… talking to me about the problem."

Lara kept on staring into space.


	6. Chapter 6

The next day at school was quite possibly even worse than the previous day. All the teachers ignored her completely, like she was the plague, and when required to say something to her, they would talk very slowly and loudly and make sure that their mouths were easy to read. Lara found this amusing after a while and began to play along with it all, even though she was always near the boiling over point of frustration.

Lara never knew how much she hated music teachers until she stepped into the music room for the first time. The music teacher thought that theory was all that she was capable of, and that Lara could never possibly play an instrument properly. That infuriated Lara. While all the other kids would go into the other music room and play their designated instruments, Lara and Curtis Danko would sit in the Theory room and write sheet after sheet of complete gibberish on Scales and Triads and Notes that Lara could have done in her sleep if she tried. So instead, Lara found herself failing music miserably, along with English. Whenever she sat down and tried to write a story, she found half way through her assignment that it would be much too dark, disturbing, or cynical to hand in to the teacher, so she'd keep what she had and not hand anything in. After a few days, however, she became spiteful towards her English teacher and she began writing the most disturbing stories she could think of that was inside the guidelines she had been given, and then she'd hand it in to her. She stopped failing English very quickly after that, and was given a passing grade, with a note scribbled down telling her to write less disturbing stories so that her teacher could give her a higher mark.

Up until Mid-October, Lara had made absolutely, positively, no attempt to make friends with anyone, not even Curtis Danko. However, the inevitable occurred one day; she was forced to deliver his homework to him one day after school, after he was absent. Lara could honestly say she wasn't nervous, scared, or dreading dropping off his homework, after all, she saw him almost seven days a week, whether it was at school, or at night, when she played her violin. Either way, she was going to see him, so it truly was no big deal. After slipping through the ivy covered gate, she walked up to the gate, suddenly feeling restless, and fighting the urge to turn around and run to her house and into her bed under the covers. Instead, she held her head high and gently banged the heavy brass knocker against the tall wooden doors. No sooner then she had let go of the knocker had the door swung open and Curtis Danko appeared a foot away from her, pale and as gaunt as ever, but no sign of illness showed upon his features. Lara gently handed him a short note saying 'Homework, sorry' on it to him, then handed him the books she had been carrying. He nodded goodbye to her, then in a deep voice asked tentively after staring at her for a few seconds;

"Would you want to…to come in?"


End file.
